Summary:In the past few days, there have been multiple disclosures of security vulnerabilies in a wide range of Google products, including a persistent e-mail theft issue affecting the widely used GMail service.

Google's security model is not holding up very well to scrutiny from hackers.

In the past few days, there have been multiple disclosures of security vulnerabilities in a wide range of Google products, including a persistent e-mail theft issue affecting the widely used GMail service.

The unpatched GMail bug, which was demonstrated for me by hacker Petko D. Petkov, is particularly nasty because of the way the exploit works without any user action and the fact that it's difficult for the average GMail user to know that e-mails are being stolen.

The victim visits a page while being logged into GMail. Upon execution, the page performs a multipart/form-dataPOST to one of the GMail interfaces and injects a filter into the victim's filter list. In the example above, the attacker writes a filter, which simply looks for emails with attachments and forward them to an email of their choice. This filter will automatically transfer all emails matching the rule. Keep in mind that future emails will be forwarded as well. The attack will remain present for as long as the victim has the filter within their filter list, even if the initial vulnerability, which was the cause of the injection, is fixed by Google.

Google's Picasa photo-sharing software and Web service is also vulnerable to an exploit scenario that uses a combination of cross-site scripting, cross-application request forgery and URI handler weakness to steal photographs from the victim's hard drive.

Finally, there's a cross-site scripting bug in Google's Urchin Analytics service that can be exploited to steal user credentials. An explanation of this vulnerability has been published by Adrian Pastor.

Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues. He is currently security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, an anti-malware company with operations around the globe. He is taking a leadership role in developing the company's online community initiative around secure content managem...
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Disclosure

The most important disclosure is of my employment with Kaspersky Lab as a member of the global research and analysis team. Kaspersky Lab is a global company specializing in anti-malware and secure content management technologies. I do not own stocks or other investments in any technology company.